Wednesday, March 4, 2009

How It Goes

So I took a trip to Boston this past weekend, if you can't tell by the HUGE DROPKICK MURPHYS MURAL that I'm standing in front of. I was also in Allston, and was hoping to see somebody from Big D in the Kids Table wandering around. But I just heard rave music instead. That's all I know about Boston the music scene I guess. Dropkick and Big D and that everybody there was or is in a hardcore band. I gotta find that city where everyone was or is in a ska band. When I do, I shall look upon that city and I shall whisper it's name into the dusty wind- Skaheaven. Or I guess it would be Skeaven. I don't know. But yeah, Boston is a pretty sweet place.

Anyways, like I had written before, the people at the Boston Underground Film Festival had been kind enough to invite me up to screen some of my materials with animator Patrick Smith. It was lots of fun, always interesting to see people react to all the For Tax Reasons material in real life. So I have to give a big thanks to Anna and everyone at BUFF and Amy and everyone involved with Space 242 for showing my stuff and putting me up. I hope they'll have me back someday.

So, we've been getting some pretty good reactions to the new short which is real nice considering the stress we had put ourselves through to get it done and uploaded. In fact, just uploading it was a like 6 hour ordeal. We had been rushing through the whole process, trying to get it done early that week; didn't have the time to go over each shot with a fine toothed comb. The result- a whole lot of rendering, realizing we had missed something, and then going back to rerender. I give you the actual gchat conversation between Matt and I the day we were trying to upload the short to Youtube.What you see is me rendering out the final shots from After Effects, putting them into Final Cut, exporting the full short from Final Cut to a Quicktime, compressing that Quicktime for upload to Youtube- THEN realizing I had missed something and going back to After Effects. And of course complaining to Matt about it the whole time.

This went on past 8pm. As you can see, at some point around 5:50 pm I had thought this whole thing was pretty amusing and started taking screen caps of the conversation, but the novelty quickly faded away. Even after we had settled on a render, we were having trouble with Youtube because the several uploads that we had cancelled had mucked up the system, preventing our final upload from fully processing.

But whatever, we got it up there eventually and people really latched on to it, which was great. I mean, as far as the content was concerned, we thought it was pretty good. And as I've said before, Tim Martin and Emily Tarver, who provided the voices for Hank Henderson and Agent Wilkins, both did an awesome job. Their reads and improvisations is what made this short funny.

Visually however, we thought we had fallen short. We had spent so much time with Episode 2.5 crafting these backgrounds and trying to really utilize the great perspective possibilities of a parking garage. But when we moved forward to Episode 3, we had arrogantly decided "Oh, this is simple, it all takes place in a small room, no problem". The boards we really rough, and I ended up just eyeballing most of the background drawing. The result was some wonky shots that had to be reworked into these very boring, straight laced shots. Some garbled perspective. And a general disappointment with our lives and what we had become as human beings.

The room was small, but the scene was supposed to be dramatic and intense. We could have made the angles more interesting, and given more depth to this thing which would have better serviced the dialogue and voice acting. But you know, the good thing about making mistakes is that you learn from them. And we've learned, twice over, that you have to make decent storyboards, and pay attention to composition and perspective.

Hopefully we will impress ourselves with the next short. I don't know why I wrote all this, I just wanted to post that gchat conversation. Anyways, because this was a long rant, I leave you with a drawing I made of a girl trying to get her jeans off her foot.

this post reminded me, the fad is getting back together for a benefit show at the end of may methinks, somewhere just outside of nyc and it looks like there's a 3 floors of ska coming up at the end of may as well. food for thought! mash it up!